A Recommender System for Complex Real-World Applications with Nonlinear Dependencies and Knowledge Graph Context

Abstract

Most latent feature methods for recommender systems learn to encode user preferences and item characteristics based on past user-item interactions. While such approaches work well for standalone items (e.g., books, movies), they are not as well suited for dealing with composite systems. For example, in the context of industrial purchasing systems for engineering solutions, items can no longer be considered standalone. Thus, latent representation needs to encode the functionality and technical features of the engineering solutions that result from combining the individual components. To capture these dependencies, expressive and context-aware recommender systems are required. In this paper, we propose NECTR, a novel recommender system based on two components: a tensor factorization model and an autoencoder-like neural network. In the tensor factorization component, context information of the items is structured in a multi-relational knowledge base encoded as a tensor and latent representations of items are extracted via tensor factorization. Simultaneously, an autoencoder-like component captures the non-linear interactions among configured items. We couple both components such that our model can be trained end-to-end. To demonstrate the real-world applicability of NECTR, we conduct extensive experiments on an industrial dataset concerned with automation solutions. Based on the results, we find that NECTR outperforms state-of-the-art methods by approximately 50% with respect to a set of standard performance metrics.